Some aspects of website design are complicated, some require A/B testing, analytics and years of experience to get right. But as with everything in life it’s the simple things that trip us up. If you find that you’ve got a high ‘bounce’ rate (this is where users come to your website and then leave without exploring further) or if you find that you’re just not getting results from people landing on your website then maybe it could just be a combination of the following:

Your website takes an age to load – easily spotted if you log in from a device and set a watch, alternatively go to Google PageSpeed Tools and enter your website. It’ll give you a grade and also some suggestions to fix. Some of the fixes will be simple others not so much. This is one time where the tortoise doesn’t win, indeed the hare got the business and the gold medal here.

Your news section is a bit sparse or really (really!) old. Count how many sites you come across with 2 news items in the news section and one of them is from 2014 announcing their new website. Definitely says to a potential customer this site is stale. Simple way around this is to post news items without a date or at least without a year. Obviously the ideal solution is to post regularly however we all know that’s not always possible.

Copyright 1999! Check your copyright notice and put in the current year, if you know some php you could even stretch to “echo date(“Y”);” and enclose it in PHP tags. Check out this site for a simple how to for a variety of setups.

Really obvious dead links. Check your menus and main call to actions, it’s very easy for a page to be linked ever so slightly wrong and suddenly all those willing customers are just lemmings falling to their doom into a 404 page. We use our own in house tools but sites like Broken Link Checker do the job quickly.

It’s shocking on mobile…Seriously open your website on a mobile, if you have to pinch zoom to see stuff you’re on the highway to loser street. We did say this list was simple reasons and while the fix is normally a site redesign or at least heavy customisation it’s such a simple reason all the same…I mean if over half the visitors to websites are now mobile users you’re basically telling them to leave and find someone who cares. It’s literally their first impression of you when they arrive.

Not delivering worthy content or showing you care. We said 5 but we gave you 6, because we care. It’s obvious when a site’s sole purpose was to tick a box that says ‘we’re online’. If you want to attract customers from your website then you should show them that you’re interested. Post relevant timely news, update the content, get them onto your mailing list (GDPR compliantly of course!), send them an email once in a while.

These are a few easy items we see that can be fixed mostly with a little bit of TLC and maybe a web design company (or an Awesome Digital Agency *cough* hint hint!) but if you’re going to have an online presence then make the most of it and use it to drive business not just tick the box that says I have a website on your business cards.